Library

The words, used the way the product uses them.

Every term here is one you’ll meet inside a Deal Package. Seven of them carry the whole journey: Deal Package, Zoe Score, Company, Company contact, Deal, Desk and Portfolio. Those seven are defined here exactly as the product defines them. Where a term belongs to the industry rather than to us, it has a page of its own and its row here points to it.

Ask Zoeproprietary: Questions and answers linked to the Deal Package itself. Ask about any finding, score, or claim in it and the answer points back to the evidence behind it. Available on every plan.
Behavioral Metadataproprietary: Data about how work happens, not what the work is. Metadata is who communicates with whom, how fast, across which channels, at what cadence. Zoe reads it from the connected systems over scoped OAuth and stores the synced records; in Slack she also scores message text and then drops it, so message bodies are never stored. (The deck, data-room files and the Company Call transcript are stored for the diagnostic too.) The patterns turn out to be more predictive than the content, which is why the method survives the privacy conversation instead of losing it.
C-Suite Healthproprietary: A Zoe health dimension that measures leadership effectiveness from behavioral data: decision latency, communication reach, communication concentration, and follow-through rate. C-Suite burnout is the single biggest leading indicator of underperformance, yet no traditional DD process measures it.
Claim Ledgerproprietary: The pitch deck, one row per claim. Each row is checked against the connected systems and the data-room evidence once they arrive, and each row ends up confirmed, contradicted, or open. Open rows become the questions for the Company Call.
Communication Pulseproprietary: A Zoe metric for the rhythm and health of information flow across an organization: message cadence, response latency, how evenly communication is distributed, and how concentrated it is around a few individuals. It is read from metadata: timing and routing. A steady, well-distributed pulse signals healthy collaboration; a slowing or over-concentrated pulse flags bottlenecks and silo risk.
Companyproprietary: The business a diagnostic examines. One word for it on every surface: the company. Its deck becomes the Claim Ledger, its systems connect to Zoe, and its Zoe Score is what the investor reads at the end.
Company Callproprietary: One call with the company contact, usually the CEO or the CFO. The questions are generated from the gaps the Claim Ledger leaves open. The transcript is ingested and each answer is scored answered, dodged, or contradicted. No surveys, no forty interviews: one call, scored.
Company contactproprietary: The person at the company who grants Zoe access to the company’s systems. A CEO, a CFO or an operations lead can hold the role. They open the Company Invite, accept the Data Processing Agreement, and connect the sources in their own session. The investor never sees a credential.
Company Inviteproprietary: How a company grants access. The investor sends a signed link to the company contact; whoever holds the keys there (often the CEO, CFO or an admin) opens it. The link presents the Data Processing Agreement; accepting it is logged as a consent event. The company contact then connects QuickBooks, one CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce), GitHub, Jira and Slack in their own session. Zoe only reads, though the permission a provider grants can be broader than what Zoe reads. The investor never sees a credential.
Confidence and Coverage Tierproprietary: What travels with every Zoe Score. Confidence is a percentage: how sure Zoe is of the number given the data behind it. The coverage tier says how much of the nine dimensions the connected sources and evidence actually reach. Thin data lowers both rather than being guessed at, and the Signed Opinion issues only when confidence clears the bar.
Culture & Peopleproprietary: A Zoe health dimension that measures the health of the human system from behavior: cross-team channel edges, response latency, meeting load, and change points, read from Slack. Culture problems are leading indicators of execution problems. A declining Culture & People score often precedes drops in Delivery & Execution.
Dealproprietary: The entry plan. It buys one Deal Package: one company, one diagnostic, and the full deliverable. The Zoe Score across nine dimensions, the findings, the IC Memo, the Evidence Appendix, and the Signed Opinion when confidence clears the bar.
Deal Packageproprietary: What one paid diagnostic on one company delivers: the signed document you hold at the end, formerly called the Read. Inside 24 hours of the run it carries the Zoe Score across nine dimensions with findings and how to read them, the IC Memo, the Signed Opinion when confidence clears the bar, and the Evidence Appendix. Ask Zoe sits alongside it for questions, and the export suite carries it into your own IC pack.
Decision Heart Rateproprietary: A Zoe metric for the cadence at which an organization makes and resolves decisions: how often decisions are initiated, how long they take to close, and how many approval hops they pass through. It is inferred from communication metadata. A strong, regular decision heart rate signals operational vitality; a slow or erratic one predicts execution drag after close. Closely related to Decision Velocity.
Decision Velocityproprietary: The average time from when a decision is needed to when it is made and communicated. Measured from meeting patterns, approval chains, and Slack-to-action latency. Slow decision velocity is the silent killer of post-acquisition value, and it is invisible at close, when financial performance can look identical.
Deck Dropproprietary: The first thing that goes into a diagnostic’s data room: the company’s pitch deck. Zoe reads it and turns every claim in it into a row of the Claim Ledger. Other data-room PDFs and CSVs can follow as evidence, but the deck comes first.
Delivery & Executionproprietary: A Zoe health dimension measuring whether the company actually ships. Tracks deploy frequency, on-time delivery rate, sprint completion, lead time, and unplanned firefighting ratio. Most board decks show vanity velocity charts; real execution health lives in the operational data.
Deskproprietary: The subscription plan. It covers a book of companies under diligence, so a team running several diagnostics at once works from one desk instead of buying each one.
Evidence Appendixproprietary: The back of a Deal Package: every finding traced to the metric, the dated pull, the Claim Ledger row, or the Company Call answer that supports it. It is why a Zoe finding can be checked rather than believed.
Financial Vitalityproprietary: The Zoe health dimension that carries the most weight at most stages. Measures the financial foundation of the business through six metrics: Cash Runway, Burn Multiple, Net Revenue Retention, Gross Margin, Revenue Growth Rate, and Capital Efficiency Ratio. Sourced from the accounting and CRM systems the company connects, and checked against what the deck claimed (Said vs True).
Health Dimensionproprietary: One of the nine operational categories a diagnostic scores: Financial Vitality, Delivery & Execution, Culture & People, C-Suite, Market & Competition, Go-to-Market, Vision & Strategy, Product & Customer, and Risk. Each dimension has its own sub-metrics and data sources, and the score they roll up to carries a confidence percentage and a coverage tier.
IC Memoproprietary: The investment-committee memo inside a Deal Package: the findings, the score, and what they mean for the deal, written so it can go into the IC pack as it stands. It states what Zoe read and what it did not; the decision stays the buyer’s.
Portfolioproprietary: The top plan: everything in Desk, at custom pricing. Portfolio monitoring is planned. It is not available today.
Said vs Trueproprietary: The automatic cross-check that fires once the company’s books connect: what the deck said against what the systems record. It runs without anyone asking, and its results feed the Claim Ledger, the Company Call questions, and the findings in the Deal Package.
Seal the Deal Packageproprietary: How a diagnostic closes. You mark the company invested or passed, and nothing is deleted: the connections, the evidence and the Deal Package stay. Deleting the workspace deletes its data and revokes its grants.
Signed Opinionproprietary: Zoe’s signed view of the operational picture, issued when confidence clears the bar. It is not a quality-of-earnings, legal, or market opinion, and it does not make the buy decision. When confidence is below the bar the Deal Package says so and ships without it.
Stage Weightingproprietary: Zoe’s approach to scoring companies at different maturity stages. A pre-seed company is judged differently than a PE portfolio company. At pre-seed, C-Suite Health and Vision & Strategy dominate; at growth stage, Financial Vitality and Delivery & Execution carry more weight. Stage-weighted scoring prevents apples-to-oranges comparison across a mixed portfolio.
Zoe Scoreproprietary: A composite score (0 to 100) across nine dimensions: Financial Vitality, Delivery & Execution, Culture & People, C-Suite, Market & Competition, Go-to-Market, Vision & Strategy, Product & Customer, and Risk, weighted for the company’s stage. Computed when a diagnostic runs; it ships with a confidence percentage and a coverage tier. Every point decomposes to the metrics and the dated pulls behind it. 78 and above reads Healthy, 55 to 77 Attention, below 55 Critical. The band is always named in words next to the number, never carried by color alone.
Burn Multiplepromoted: Net burn divided by net new ARR over a period. A burn multiple below 1.0 is excellent; 1.0–2.0 is good; above 3.0 signals capital inefficiency. Zoe checks burn multiple against what the deck claimed.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)promoted: The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including expansion and churn. NRR above 110% indicates strong product-market fit; below 90% signals structural churn. A Zoe sub-metric under Financial Vitality.
Quality of Earnings (QofE)promoted: A financial diligence deliverable that normalizes reported EBITDA by adjusting for one-time items, accounting irregularities, and revenue recognition issues. A QofE is the standard for financial DD, but it says nothing about whether the company can execute its plan post-close.

From term to finding

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A finished example shows how operating signals become scored findings for the IC.

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